


clouds march along to the tune of our heartbeats

by crocustongues



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-27 09:09:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17159237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crocustongues/pseuds/crocustongues
Summary: It starts small, like things always do: with yearly spring cleaning.





	clouds march along to the tune of our heartbeats

**Author's Note:**

> my zine piece for midnight to morning coffee: a kurodai fanzine!!! thank u in cosmic amounts to astrid!!! thank u for letting me write a piece for not one but two zines this year! it was lovely working with everyone & this is the best way i could've ended the year!ヽ(＾Д＾)ﾉ
> 
> more thanks than i can count on my hands to kim for beta-ing the fic & generally being an all-round patient & kind person! i would've crumbled had it not been for ur praise & fortitude! (❁´◡`❁)

It starts small, like things always do: with yearly spring cleaning. It devolves into the usual: their memories together.

 

Tetsurou pulls out the drawer and empties out its contents rather unceremoniously, wrinkling his nose at the amount of dust their memories have gathered over the years. He picks up the first thing in the pile, a stack of elastic-bound take-out menus; he recognises the flame-red logo for the ramen shop down the boulevard, the one they’d frequented on countless nights after they’d moved into this part of town, to the point where the couple who owned the shop announced they were moving away one fine evening, both he and Daichi received a free bowl of ramen and their son’s phone number.

(“Just in case you have any problems,” the man says, lighting a cigarette. His wife nods and adds that Taka-chan could fix any problem in the world, from leaky pipes to jammed doorways. Daichi’d taken the number with grateful hands, silently sharing the memory Tetsurou himself was thinking about—the _sink_.

Their house was a work in progress, but their sink was a true menace in an eerie, almost-sentient way, in the sense that no matter what they did, they could never stop their kitchen from flooding every other week.)

Daichi’s out, taking a break. The dust really, _really_ bothers him, Tetsurou knows, but Daichi is as stubborn as a mule, and when he’s set his mind to something—cleaning, in this case—he’ll do it, despite having to take many, many breaks, eyes watering and muffled sneezing that can be heard from one room over. Daichi’s always been practical, but never when it comes to things like this. It’s always Tetsurou, who, just for the record, _hates_ cleaning, suggests that _perhaps it’s time to stop for the day, Daichi, I’ll finish up here, why don’t you go look for Beans, isn’t it time to feed her already?_

He hates that Daichi is so overly keen on cleaning, especially when he’s so prone to allergies, and most of all, he hates how his heart aches at Daichi’s plight, and ties the hanky a little tighter around his face and ushers Daichi out.

He sucks it up and throws out the old magazines and menu cards, except for the one with Taka-chan’s number on it which tucks safely in the drawer. He takes off the hanky and wipes the little knob, breathing a sigh of relief (lightly, there’s still more dust in the air than Tetsurou cares to have), joining Daichi outside, who’s busy spoiling Beans to bits.

･:*:･ﾟ’✫,’✫’ﾟ･:*:･˙

If Daichi had to name one bad habit, he’d say it was the inability to a straightforward ‘I love you’.

It’s not like he doesn’t love Tetsurou--with all his heart, from bottom to top--it’s the inability to articulate what feels in three letters, simple and _not enough_. Ever since college, checking the weather in Tokyo everytime he checked his own city’s, hoping Tetsurou remembered to carry an umbrella, just in case, to now, watching the sun go down over crooked horizons together, warm hills and valleys a constant in their lives.

But there are texts, sometimes.

(‘ _Have you eaten? I packed some sandwiches for you_.’)

There is subtext, all the time.

Thankfully Tetsurou speaks it, and understands it well, and holds it carefully in the cleft between his ventricles.

･:*:･ﾟ’✫,’✫’ﾟ･:*:･˙

If you ask Tetsurou, it’s frustrating. If you ask him sometime later, well after his hissy fit is over, he’ll tell you it’s sad. Lonely. Hollowing. He _hates_ it, you can tell, when Daichi’s mad at him.

Usually, it’s all fire and acid, until they’re both out of ammunition, and they’ll retreat to their lairs--Daichi to the bedroom, and Tetsurou to the study, both brooding and stewing over something they’ll make up by morning.

But sometimes, _rarely_ , Tetsurou thanks his stars, something will go wrong in the process of forgiveness, throwing a wrench in the works. They’ll go out of their way to avoid each other, and the warm morning coffee they enjoy together turns cold on the kitchen counter.

Tetsurou wishes there was some kind replicable method to fighting and forgiveness. An evidence-backed, empirical method, with enough statistical data to win over even the most venomous of arguments, a step-by-step guide with a video tutorial, easy to master in a mere few minutes.

It sucks, this thought. Its clinical coldness runs icy shivers up and down his spine, but he wishes he didn’t have to go days without talking to Daichi, and be so miserable about it, even Kenma is annoyed, all the way from America. So he thinks of another thought instead, a lesson in the act of forgiveness.

It’s funny how Daichi makes him want to be a better person, even when they’re fighting. It’s funnier with him around, laughing alongside him, over the ten thousand things waiting to be dusted clean.

･:*:･ﾟ’✫,’✫’ﾟ･:*:･˙

Daichi reflects sometimes, how the night feels _entire_ , how in the daytime life feels like it's playing in a loop. The night feels the exact opposite, to Daichi, and he feels whole, blanketed by the night that unsmooths his edges. Daichi likes to think it makes him more than the sum of his parts, where identity and individuality mean more under the stars than in the shonen magazines lying atop their coffee table.

The sentiment is not shared by Tetsurou. While to Daichi the night sings a lullaby, to him the dark serves as a reminder of the vastness of the outside. He feels existential, and not in the ways of 17th-century philosophers, but in the way non-ideal solutions when mixed don't add up - the lack of an answer when he asks himself who he really is, questioning every aspect of himself. It feels terrible, not being sure of yourself.

Daichi knows this, listening to the shallow breathing under the covers, and hates how he can't help it. It doesn’t stop him from trying, though. He tells him about Beans' dumb stunt of the day. He does his best to encapsulate the general theory of relativity into an emotion.

(it comes across _perfectly_ , incidentally, punctuating Tetsurou's downward spiral, as he leans into the kiss)

Sometimes Tetsurou forgets that it's okay to think some things are make-believe, like the _kotori obake_ story about the woods near his childhood home.

He remembers all of this when he turns around, late, late at night, when he comes face to face, almost touching noses with Daichi, interlacing their fingers together, and finally falling asleep in the wee hours of the morning, boxes upon boxes waiting to be cleaned out.

･:*:･ﾟ’✫,’✫’ﾟ･:*:･˙

Tetsurou is a hoarder.

There’s no polite way of putting it. Daichi sighs for the umpteenth time, holding an old NES console that is likely not even theirs. Kenma and Tetsurou had grown up together, and so, Tetsurou is as fond of gaming as Kenma is. As a result, it isn’t the first time Daichi’s found an old gaming equipment somewhere around the flat.

He empties out the box, sorting through the games, painstakingly labelled in black ink, smiling every time he thought he recognised a name-- _Metroid, Dragon Warrior, Donkey Kong_. It reminds him of the week he’d gone home to visit his family over break, and when he’d returned, he’d found two figures huddled under piles and piles of blankets in the dark, surrounded by dirty paper plates and half-eaten takeout containers, the faintly glowing television screen the only source of light in the room.

He’d made them take a shower each and cooked them some actual food, knowing neither Kenma nor Tetsurou would have moved a muscle when absorbed in their game. Legend of Zelda be damned if instant ramen is all they’ve been eating.

It’s quite the miracle the console even connects to their new television, much less operate the games that came with it. Daichi puts them all back in their box, putting them all back in neat piles, humming the Super Mario Bros. 3 theme to himself.

･:*:･ﾟ’✫,’✫’ﾟ･:*:･

Tetsurou finds the photographs. Bundled in elastic in a shoebox. They’re all labelled neatly, with dates and locations on the back, arranged chronologically. A sepia-toned nostalgia overtakes him as he goes through the pictures; there’s one of him and Daichi in his old house, back in central Tokyo, one of Kenma in a yukata for that festival they’d all gone to right after their graduation, one of their team reunion a few months ago (Lev’s crying in the picture, and Tetsurou takes a picture of it on his phone and sends it to the group chat they have with no less than five cry-laughing emojis).

There’s so many of them, each with a familiar face smiling back up at him; each with a familiar memory, and a familiar laugh. There’s a few Tetsurou remembers taking, like the one he’s looking at now--a fairly blurry one of Daichi, smiling wide right at the camera, dimple showing on one cheek.

He remembers this one clear as day; they’d gone to Kyoto over Golden Week a few years ago, wide-eyed and awed at the different shrines they’d visited. He hadn’t told Daichi he liked him yet, that was a far off ideal, but Tetsurou remembers teasing Daichi about his smile, and Daichi, in the most Daichi fashion, had taken it in stride and smiled as wide as he could.

Light becomes photographs through a series of changes in chemical equilibria. Turns out Tetsurou’s love was, too.

**Author's Note:**

> find me, if u would like, on twitter @floralsonnets or on ye olde garbage dumplr @gulabijamuns!
> 
> leave validation for me pls the end of the year is a cold time and mother gothel begrudges me not a scrap of warmth in this tall tower of isolation. i must break out soon.


End file.
